Thanks for taking the time to engage with my reply. I’d like to engage with a few of the points you made.
First of all, my point prefaced with ‘speaking abstractly’ was genuinely that. I thought your paper was poorly argued, but certainly within acceptable limits that it should not result in withdrawn funding. On a sufficient timeframe, everybody will put out some duds, and your organizations certainly have a track record of producing excellent work. My point was about avoiding an overcorrection, where consistently low quality work is guaranteed some share of scarce funding merely out of fear that withdrawing such funding would be seen as censorship. It’s a sign of healthy epistemics (in a dimension orthogonal to the criticisms of your post) for a community to be able to jump from a specific discussion to the general case, but I’m sorry you saw my abstraction as a personal attack.
You saw “we do not argue against the TUA, but point out the unanswered questions we observed. .. but highlight assumptions that may be incorrect or smuggle in values”. Pointing out unanswered questions and incorrect assumptions is how you argue against something! What makes your paper polemical is that you do not sufficiently check whether the questions really are unanswered, or if the assumptions really are incorrect. There is no tension between calling your paper polemical and saying you do not sufficiently critique the TUA. A more thorough critique that took counterarguments seriously and tried to address them would not be a polemic, as it would more clearly be driven by truth-seeking than hostility.
I was not “asking that we [you] articulate and address every hypothetical counterargument”, I was asking that you address any, especially the most obvious ones. Don’t just state “it is unclear why” they are believed to skip over a counterargument.
I am disappointed that you used my original post to further attack the epistemics of this community, and doubly so for claiming it failed to articulate clear, specific criticisms. The post was clear that the main failing I saw in your paper was a lack of engagement with counterarguments, specifically the case for technological differentiation and the case for avoiding the disenfranchisement of future generations through a limited democracy. I do not believe that my criticism of the paper jumping around too much rather than engaging deeply on fewer issues was ambiguous either. Ignoring these clear, specific criticisms to use the post as evidence of poor epistemics in the EA community makes me think you may be interpreting any disagreement as evidence for your point.
Hi Carla,
Thanks for taking the time to engage with my reply. I’d like to engage with a few of the points you made.
First of all, my point prefaced with ‘speaking abstractly’ was genuinely that. I thought your paper was poorly argued, but certainly within acceptable limits that it should not result in withdrawn funding. On a sufficient timeframe, everybody will put out some duds, and your organizations certainly have a track record of producing excellent work. My point was about avoiding an overcorrection, where consistently low quality work is guaranteed some share of scarce funding merely out of fear that withdrawing such funding would be seen as censorship. It’s a sign of healthy epistemics (in a dimension orthogonal to the criticisms of your post) for a community to be able to jump from a specific discussion to the general case, but I’m sorry you saw my abstraction as a personal attack.
You saw “we do not argue against the TUA, but point out the unanswered questions we observed. .. but highlight assumptions that may be incorrect or smuggle in values”. Pointing out unanswered questions and incorrect assumptions is how you argue against something! What makes your paper polemical is that you do not sufficiently check whether the questions really are unanswered, or if the assumptions really are incorrect. There is no tension between calling your paper polemical and saying you do not sufficiently critique the TUA. A more thorough critique that took counterarguments seriously and tried to address them would not be a polemic, as it would more clearly be driven by truth-seeking than hostility.
I was not “asking that we [you] articulate and address every hypothetical counterargument”, I was asking that you address any, especially the most obvious ones. Don’t just state “it is unclear why” they are believed to skip over a counterargument.
I am disappointed that you used my original post to further attack the epistemics of this community, and doubly so for claiming it failed to articulate clear, specific criticisms. The post was clear that the main failing I saw in your paper was a lack of engagement with counterarguments, specifically the case for technological differentiation and the case for avoiding the disenfranchisement of future generations through a limited democracy. I do not believe that my criticism of the paper jumping around too much rather than engaging deeply on fewer issues was ambiguous either. Ignoring these clear, specific criticisms to use the post as evidence of poor epistemics in the EA community makes me think you may be interpreting any disagreement as evidence for your point.